Friday, June 29, 2012

Operation Fast and Furious is not about politicization, as the left would have you believe. It is about gun control. The American people should be absolutely outraged by this operation, but instead it has been swept under the rug and ignored. The fact that hundreds of people have died is, apparently by ATF standards, nothing more than a further argument for more restrictive gun regulations.

If you have any doubts, a quick check of the facts will set you right. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, who has been doggedly following this story since February of 2011, has a great primer on the scandal. Here's how the operation worked, in a nutshell:

First, the ATF persuaded some of their informants to purchase large quantities of "long guns" - high caliber rifles. Then, when the gun shop owners contacted the ATF out of concern for the large numbers attempting to be purchased by rather shady buyers, the ATF encouraged the dealers to sell to the informants. Agents were specifically ordered to stop tracking the weapons and not interdict, virtually guaranteeing the weapons would cross the border and reach the cartels. ATF then planned to use the large number of guns sold as leverage to institute "Demand Letter 3", which would place strict regulations over the purchase of said long guns. According to emails, the fact that many of the guns made it over the border and were responsible for hundreds of deaths was seen as justification for their planned regulation. And now they're doing everything they can to cover it up.

The ATF forced gun dealers to sell enormous quantities of guns to extremely shady people and then wanted to use the fact that gun dealers sell enormous quantities of guns to extremely shady people in order to enact stricter regulations. That's like demanding Chevy remove the exhaust filters from all the new Corvettes, then instituting new EPA regulations outlawing or restricting new sports car sales due to the environmental impact of the exhaust system. And now they're wide-eyed and saying they've never heard of such a thing as a 'sports car' before. Quite a racket.

To put not too fine a point on it, our government knowingly and willingly sold guns to Mexican drug cartels, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, in order to push for more gun control laws. And now they are doing everything they can to cover it up. Which is why Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of congress this week.

If stricter gun regulation wasn't the goal as democrats are arguing, then what was? It wasn't about tracking how guns get to, say, the Sinaloa drug cartel, because agents were told not to track the weapons. It obviously wasn't to help the Mexican government with their cartel problems, because if that were the case, wouldn't we have let them in on the operation? Perhaps rooting out drug lords on this side of the border was the goal, but unfortunately the drug lords in question were already in the employ of or under surveillence by the FBI and the DEA. So if not those reasons, then why?

As for the claim that this is being politicized, that's an absolute fact. Democrats and their supporters have made it political by refusing to see the facts in front of them in favor of blind party loyalty to a fellow democrat. They should be ashamed.